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Assuming the continuity of the individual personality as a fact, a number of questions spring to mind. The first and simplest is that of memory. If we have lived before, when and how shall we come into possession of the memories of that past life? Certain occultists claim to be able to recall a great number of them in detail. Is this so? If it is so, then how about the doctrine of reincarnation? There again the occultists, and certain systems such as the theosophical, are very positive in their statements. And, speaking of such doctrines, are we to take literally those teachings that purport to tell the minutiae of detailed conditions in the discarnate state? How about the zones, and the multiplicity of planes, of the occultists? On the other hand, how about the carefully described landscaped 'heavens' of those purporting to speak from the spiritualistic standpoint? |
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"As to memory, in general, that is of two sorts," said Gaelic, "but both sorts depend on one thing for their existence. That one thing is experience. Without something to remember, naturally there can be no memory. "One kind of memory is that acquired, through experience, by an entity endowed with free will. The other sort is the result of experience by an entity not endowed with free will. Both," said Gaelic, "are true memory. And memory is a tool for building up the thing that possesses it. It is by the utilized memory of experience that the body of any segregated thing is expanded. "The simple body of memory acquired through the simple automatic awareness-responses of the stone, or any purely instinctive entity, builds up the faculties and content, not of a particular stone or particular amoeba, or whatever, but the quality or intention that so manifests itself. In that way, one might fancifully say that stones in general learn how to be stones in increasing sufficiency. Of such type of memory is that, for example, of cells of the body; so that one early discovers that, from long past physiological experience in the course of evolution, such subsidiary organisms acquire better, more responsive and more efficient methods of carrying out the intention, or the quality, in manifestation. "The other type of memory, coming with the individual entity as such, and born with the selecting free will which makes intelligence, builds up primarily the individual entity, and only through it the intention or quality which it represents." |
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Having established or stated these general principles applicable to all created things, Gaelic particularized on man. "Experiences," he said, "that are primarily of the first type - that is, that come to a man through automatic awareness-responses - have their effect not on the individual man, but on the human quality of consciousness, or intention. Therefore, though they may have their effect in that they have added to the sum-total of race-experience, so to speak, they are not retained in the memory of that individual. The human physical structure, to take a simple example, is daily undergoing a great multitude of experiences having to do with the sensational and instinctive, and therefore automatic, end of the spectrum which, as far as the individual is concerned, have no place in his final structure. Such things as ordinary bodily functions; some, like the beating of the heart, practically beyond conscious control, and others occupying a borderland into which free will can always theoretically, and sometimes practically, enter. "But," said Gaelic, "every experience which is a matter of action by free will, however slight, is drawn from that part of cosmos which comprises the not-done; and transferred into that part of the cosmos which comprises the thing-done. "The latter is in the realest sense possible a portion of the individual entity, and will forever remain so. The course of development from that point of view is a constant transferal from that which is outside in experience permanently to that which is - not inside, but ourselves. Once it is a part of ourselves, it is naturally a part of our personal possessions. For one reason or another we may not be able at will to place our hands on either any particular one of these possessions, or, perhaps, a desired group of them. Nevertheless they are there. No act, no experience, which has involved free will, but exists intact in the memory, and can by a proper assembly of conditions be brought intact to the conscious mind." This thought Gaelic emphasized on a number of occasions and in a variety of ways. The concepts implied were necessary to his further argument. Evidently he was urgent that we understand and accept them. They were: Every experience wholly or partly the result of free will, results in an individual memory. That memory is part of our permanent possession. It cannot be destroyed or lost. It is a part of us, whether we know it or not. |
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"Let us now take the relation of the individual in memory to that content or body which is rather the property of his quality than of his individuality, that body of memory which has come through the pure instinct or the pure sensation. His relation to it depends entirely and very, very simply, on the degree to which his contact possibilities are developed, as far as they can be developed in an individual, toward race consciousness rather than personal consciousness. In other words, the expression that 'the wider are one's human sympathies, the more power one attains,' is here taken from the figurative and placed solidly in the practical." To illustrate what he meant, Gaelic next gave us very careful directions which resulted in the construction of the following diagram.
[Diagram not included with the original text. The above diagram was created by the HTML Editor.] "A, B, C, D, E, and F are individual entities; and the angles above them represent their body or possession of memory. At first [1] they are wholly separate, distinct one from the other. A's experiences - and hence memories - and B's experiences are different. "But," said Gaelic, "as memory through experience expands the content or body of memory for the individuals A, B, C, and so forth, as above described, the sides of the angles naturally become wider apart. At a certain point [2] A and B overlap; as do also C and D, E and F, and so on. Conceive the diverging lines to extend upwards still further; then at some point [3, 4, 5...] portions of A, B, and C and so on will overlap. Carry the process on far enough, and all the field of memory of all the entities will be shared, each and each alike." Though Gaelic brings out the point later, it would be well to note here that he is talking about possession of the body of memory, not command of it. Much of it, perhaps all of it, may well be in the unconscious. "Can you carry the thought on from here," asked Gaelic, "or would you ask questions? This is an illustration merely. The point being this; that with increasing development each individual possesses in his own body of consciousness not only the experience and memories of that on which he has exercised his own free will, but also a portion of the experience and memory of, first smaller, and later larger groups, and, finally of all others of his own quality. And as they become a part of his possessions as much as though his own free will had manufactured them, he has the same power of accession to them as to those he might naturally consider his own. "In the human being on earth this must naturally take place, if at all, in the farther region, over which his control is little or none: the supra-conscious, or the subconscious. "I concern myself with the principles and processes, leaving your intelligence to supply the specific examples. But I would call your attention to many attested instances of those who have thought to remember other lives, other times, other places - with the warning that this explanation covers not all but a majority of such instances. "Only one natural question occurs to me: it may seem to you that you possess very vivid memories of scenes or incidents, and especially aesthetic appreciations in which it may be difficult for you to identify the action of free will - where you have been, so to speak, a passive spectator. For the sake of clarity I have concerned myself this evening with what one might call primal experience: that resulting purely from the action of free will on fresh circumstance. I would point out to you that there are also composite experiences in which the personal reaction would be impossible were it not for a long series of other experiences in the past. "Two people, both of what we would call 'passive spectators,' at the same thing, would obtain from it totally different reactions, and hence differing memories. Why? Not because at that moment they differently applied the free will; but because in innumerable instances in the past, in numberless differing but contributing experiences, each has differently used that power. The cross threads and interactions and inter-relations are so complicated when one examines detail rather than process that I ordinarily prefer not to quibble." |
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"There remains of this subject but one indicated division which we have not yet touched upon," said Gaelic next, "the relation of the human individual memory to what (for lack of a better term) we must call Cosmic Memory. "In attempting a discussion of this, we must first of all keep steadily and clearly before us the realization that the Cosmos in its ultimate is inunderstandable by anything but Itself. "We are privileged to examine it however, in any of its finite aspects, because within us is the potential capability of understanding ultimately, as finite creatures, whatever is comprised within the finite. "Within the finite - for what reason, with what ultimate intent, with what relations to dimensions whose very existence we cannot even remotely conceive - within the finite, the intention of the All-Conscious is the same intention by which any of its creatures is actuated - the expansion of self-consciousness by means of increasing awareness. And, as its creatures, awareness must possess both a mechanism and an object. In the contemplation of this original finite intent a duality within a unity must be proposed. The one member of the duality has that which is outside itself, to be sure; but only in the sense that it is contained by, surrounded by, comprised with the other member. "Whether it is possible for you to gain a mental idea in this apparent contradiction in terms, I doubt. It is only necessary for you to gain the conception that within the finite the All-Consciousness realizes its quality of 'I AM' by awareness of itself through response-contacts. And that the growing number and complexity of these response-contacts - which are experience - with their accompanying memories, make that growth toward perfect self-awareness which seems to be the end of the Cosmos within finity. "In order to experience awareness-contacts, it is necessary to possess awareness-mechanisms - just as any created thing possesses the mechanism of awareness of its own peculiar type, needs, or state of development. On the simple physical side, the lungs of the fish and the lungs of the air-breathing creatures are at once mechanisms of mechanical life and of response to individual necessity and environment. The Awareness mechanism of the All-Conscious, within finity, are what you call separated or segregated creations, whether the simplest or most complex. Whatever any of these created things experiences in its impulse toward its own self-awareness is also an experience and a memory of the All-Conscious. "And as the memories of individuals actually and constructively enlarge and assure the body of expansion of the individual consciousness; so does the great aggregate of awareness-response of all created things, becoming part of the All-Conscious possession, enlarge and self-assure the body and content of the possession of the All-Conscious. "And just as forever in the individual no memory is lost and no memory but can be restored by the assembly of its conditions of manifestation, so in the larger consciousness of the finite no memory is lost and all things can be reformed." |
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"The human being, considered solely as an awareness-mechanism of the All-Conscious is a delicate instrument of constantly increasing capability, and for an inscrutable reason of its own, the All-Conscious has chosen to become aware of itself as to its power of free will through that mechanism." This is important enough for restatement. Just as the eyes and ears and other organs are the awareness-mechanisms of the individual; so is the individual the awareness-mechanism of the All-Consciousness in the finite. |
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"It is as though, one could say, that in the human body a constructing Intelligence had selected the eye as a mechanism by which the person who was to become aware of the form and color of his surroundings. Without the eye he could not be so aware. And that the eye - fancifully - had the power within itself to decide for itself what it would or would not, and in what form, allow to pass its senses into the perception of the brain! The responsibility in that case would be considerable! "The fundamental and ultimately important responsibility of those creatures gifted with free will is not too unlike that crude illustration. For it is through themselves, as awareness-mechanisms, that the All-Conscious becomes aware of its finite - its finite - Self. "No human being can look into that consciousness with other understanding than he brings to the contemplation of his own. But it would not be too far a cry to guess that when Its awareness-response, through Its creatures of free will, is in harmony with the basic law, It experiences pleasure as we experience pleasure in like case. And that when those mechanisms respond to disharmony It feels the pain which our own personal disharmony - of body, for example - brings to us. And that the struggle towards self-awareness, through mistake, through ignorance, through the slow obstruction of disharmony, the feeling of effort, of triumph, of achievement or temporary defeat, as reported or reflected or embodied in the countless multitudes of Its creatures, is not unlike in kind our own gropings upward. "These things, however, are in the ultra-violet of inspiration, rather than knowledge. The little point to which all of this great speculation brings us is that in Cosmic Memory all experience that has ever been still exists, and can be recalled. "The relation of any human memory to it is in exact proportion as its consciousness has expanded through development, between the diverging lines (see diagram). As the individual becomes possessed, by expansion through effort and desire, of possessions which are the fruit of the efforts of other entities than himself, so he reaches into the All-Conscious - Cosmic Memory - and becomes possessed of that which he has earned. By the very nature of the case the farther out he gets from his immediate intellectual point in development, the more his new possessions or acquisitions of this sort enter into the intuitional or inspirational regions. "These are, I must repeat, at present almost completely out of your conscious manipulation. I will say no more than that with development, even though you move along the spectrum so to speak, conscious manipulation of what is beyond, and what you actually possess in that beyond region of intuition and inspiration, comes more fully into your hands. What you possess. And you possess only what your free will has brought you." |
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"You think," said Gaelic, "that your own personal memory is pretty well confined within the limits of your present earth life, and also is pretty well defined by those limits." We acknowledged this. He disagreed with us. "Will you tell me, from your own memory," he challenged, "what happened in the first ten minutes after your birth? Will you give me seriatim all that happened in any ten minutes of the first ten years of your life? No? Where does memory begin or leave off in your earth life? "In other words, you cannot divide this, either, into sharply bounded compartments, but must dimly conceive of a continuous process. The memory you have at command now of your past is a different degree of memory than you possessed thirty years ago. When you were fifteen years of age you could pretty well recall, I hazard, the detailed happenings of the past ten years. Is not that true? Is it not also true that your memory of the antecedent ten years was, at fifteen, more vivid in detail than your memory now of the ten years just passed? "The reason," said he, "is not a difference in memory, but a difference in the quality of recollection. The memory exists, intact. There is no happening however small, however unimportant, that cannot be recalled in its pristine vividness by the proper application of recollection. Nothing is lost, nothing whatever. "The power of recollection is not so haphazard as you might suppose. You say, in later life, that your memory is getting bad. You used to have a good memory, but now you cannot even recall what you did on Thursday of last week. Why? Is your mind failing? Not at all. The quality and degree of recollection is precisely, and beautifully, adapted to your present need in development as considered in relation to the particular substance in which your consciousness embodies itself, and to which your awareness-mechanism responds. That need differs in each and every individual. The recollection takes forth from the store-house of experience - and that in essence is all that memory is - the store-house of experience - that which its shaping sense (if healthy and unperverted) requires for the present need. As one grows older, in the average case, he has less and less need to correlate or otherwise employ the cruder physical juxtapositions which were his best raw material at an earlier stage. He is more concerned with the employment of what we may call the distillation of the essence of that type of experience into finer and more subtle decisions, both within himself and in his relations with the spiritual quality, so to speak, of his fellow men. The raw material he now needs is that distillation of essence, rather than the crude physical fact. Both the essence and the fact are garnered within the storehouse of experience. His recollection takes that which he needs, and refuses to burden itself with that which is unessential. "I am speaking in the broadest sense, making no attempt to examine stray small recollections or stray small aggravating forgetfulnesses. I seek only to sketch a principle. Now the recollection-mechanism is a part of man's equipment, as much as his eyes or his hands. It is actuated by himself through his mind. I refer to his whole mind, for a man can recollect by sensation or intuition, as well as by a deliberate employment of the intellect. If this does not instantly commend itself to you, recall the immense, sudden, but quickly obliterated memory-impression caused by a stray perfume of flowers, sometimes, or the astounding flash of half-grasped memory that sweeps across you like the shadow of a cloud when some chance arrangement merely seen by the eye opens to you a whole but flashingly transitory vision of some past. You must all have experienced those things; they are merely a functioning of the recollection-mechanism through some aspect of the mind. "We should then consider memory in essence as the store-house of experience. That definition will hold, down to the lowest embodiment of consciousness. Before personality, as such, begins, that experience is gathered by the individual as a gift to the quality or intention embodied in him. That experience is recollected, in the sense in which we used the word, almost automatically in responses to needs or exigencies in the life experience of the individual. The recollection-mechanism then works through what you call instinct. As the complexity of the creature increases, and the crises or circumstances of its existence become therefore more complex, it is necessary to recollect - to re-collect - more and more varied bits of experience, or memory. This experience or memory in the case of the more complex creature has been accumulated by a long evolutionary process from many lives, not, in this case, of the identical individual, but of the quality from which myriads of similar individuals have sprung; and also a long series of contributing qualities, and of antecedent qualities. Therefore a given juncture in this one individual life may actually recollect bits of the lives of many thousands. "In that sense, through sensation and through instinct, a creature may be said to have a perfect recollection of many incarnations, inasfar as those recollections immediately serve the present purpose in that creature's existence. |
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"At a certain point this recollection according to need is made also by the intellect, as well as by the instinct and sensation aspects of the mind. I must recall intellect to you as defined as the focusing point of consciousness on its environment for the purpose of selection according to its needs. At this point of conscious intellectual selection, the portion of the storehouse of experience open to choice is at first very limited. Nevertheless it is wider in scope than you customarily think. "Every day the merest child is recollecting for its immediate purposes small fragments or bits of many millions of lives through which its human quality has passed. In the short space of two or three years, starting apparently with nothing at all, the human child acquires an immense store of knowledge. That knowledge is so habitual a portion of everyday living that you do not wonder at it, and your evaluation of it is dulled. Nevertheless if you would for one day examine with a detached eye the detailed activities of a child, you could not but be struck by amazement at merely its muscular correlations and the ease and intelligence with which it performs feats of the body and mind which, were you to analyze them to their elements, would present a marvelously complicated accumulation of mere knowledge. The child, as you say, 'learns quickly' - so quickly that you are amazed at the facility. And were you to review the ordinary equipment for the simplest life necessary to any youth of twenty, you would sit down discouraged at the thought that in so few years so much must be inculcated. And you would have reason to be discouraged, were it not for the fact that from many incarnations, not necessarily personal to this one individual, but from many contributing incarnations of quality, experience and memory have been stored away for the use of recollection. "If you are curious-minded enough, and philosophically enough inclined, you may trace introspectively what you have learned by in some manner having been a tree or a bird or a blade of grass or a living rock or whatever. And when in your daily life you employ any of these what you call primitive instincts, you are actually to that extent re-collecting a definite memory of a former incarnation of one sort or another. |
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The preceding was the groundwork. Gaelic now proceeded, very simply, to build his structure. He had started out, it will be recalled, to explain why, if we have lived elsewhere than in our present earth surroundings, we have no continuous memory of the fact. "The most of this recollection," Gaelic unfolded his argument, "is purely through the instinct aspect of the mind. And at the risk of repetition I must point out again that mind is all one thing, whether considered as sensation or instinct, or intellect, or intuition, or aspiration. As long as the major portion of recollection comes through the instinctive aspect of the mind, it will not gain that conscious continuous recognition that dwells only in the intellectual aspect. In order to trace a given personality backward knowingly it would be requisite that you be able to correlate and compare the different portions one with another. If that is not done, continuity is lost; for if one object does not touch or in some such fashion become aware of its neighbor, as far as it is concerned it is a fragment isolated. "Now the comparing and correlating power resides in the intellectual aspect of the mind, wherever on the spectrum it may center. And since this power of continuous recollection resides in the intellectual aspect of the mind, we must again examine that aspect to refresh ourselves as to its function. At any given stage of development, it cannot act outside its function. "The function of the intellectual aspect of the mind is to select that which is necessary for existence in which the present stage of development of any entity has embodied it. If that state of development demands a simple and limited environment of few and limited choices, for the fostering of especial attributes in need of progress, the intellect will be focused merely and entirely upon those needs; and its power of recollection will be confined to the elements of that environment solely; leaving to the instinctive recollection, on one side, the task of selecting from past personal incarnations that which is necessary to its persistence in that environment; and to the intuitional aspects, on the other side, to select from the memory of the human quality, as a quality, that which is necessary for the progressing expansion of that entity. In that case you can very well see that consciously in correlation and continuity the individual can have no recollection or memory of other incarnations by the very necessity and nature of the case." |
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We have then, no continuity of memory because conscious memory is for use and not for curiosity or amusement. Nothing that has happened to us is ever really lost to us. It is in storehouse, and can be brought out at any time by an act of recollection. As far as our instincts are concerned, our bodily functions, the recollecting is done by a portion of the mind outside our intellect; and the storehouse from which the recollecting is done is the race experience largely. Likewise, often, what we call inspiration or intuition is really a recollecting, from the same storehouse, by another portion of our minds outside the intellect. Both types are for a purpose, and are limited to that purpose. It was on this aspect that Gaelic began his next discourse. "We have perhaps established a broad general principle that recollection is not an idle thing, but is always for use. We have indicated a broad corollary, that the recollection from individual experience has its use in the instinct of the entity by decision in that substance wherein it is embodied at the moment; and that recollection from quality or racial experience is for use in its expansion in progress, or growth. "This distinction is subject to many modifications which it is impossible to consider in the time at our disposal; but it is important. "The maintenance of the individual in its present environment as you know it, and in the state of average development up to now in that environment, is largely what you call material or physical. Since that is so, the body of recollection of past personal incarnation comes mostly through the instincts; is hence uncorrelated, and therefore discontinuous. As development goes on, by expansion through effort and decision, this degree of correspondence will become increasingly automatic, requiring no decision. Certain physical correspondences of the sort you are now working out have already, in your own case, become so; they require no intervention of the intellectual aspect of the mind at all. The body of possession of this sort is constantly increasing. "The power of progress is also an accelerating thing. It widens both in scope and in complexity. For its proper functioning it requires in mere quantity more and more raw material, so to speak, with which to work. It comes into more correspondences, with larger things. These raw materials are drawn in exactly the same way, as needed, from the storehouse of those things which have happened and those decisions which have been made in the course of growth. As more and more are needed, more and more come within the recollection mechanism of the individual. Those which are subject to conscious decision through free will, more and more are appropriated and correlated through the intellectual aspect of the mind. "Thus by expansion and growth, mankind slowly but surely edges toward that point where the isolated fragments one by one crowd nearer and nearer toward one another, so to speak, until a chain of continuity must inevitably be established. "It is in effect much like dropping stones in a pool of water. You drop one stone, and the water is the same; or two, or three, or a score. Always the surface of the pond remains smooth, unbroken, unrevealing. But at the last - perhaps the thousandth stone - all at once the surface is broken with significance. "One earns his knowledge of his past; and a time will come when the capacity of use will be so expanded by development that it can employ, and does employ, not single fragments widely separated; but by right of ability, can and does select or recollect for use, any or all of an unbroken series. Then all at once, as the last stone arose above the surface of the pool, complete continuity - which means continuous memory - comes to the individual. "As to when, or in what embodiment, that continuity will take place, cannot be predicted in general. It is an individual thing. Persons beyond the veil of what you call death do not necessarily nor at once attain any degree of this power. They are not, you must understand, necessarily cut off from memory of earth life either; for that is most often a type of experience which is of most immediate use to them in their next succeeding embodiment. As far as tracing back is concerned, they are little better off than yourselves." |
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"Except for this: in ordinary cases the entity which is born from the human quality on your earth has progressed to a point where opportunity is expanding in a geometric ratio. "I realize that there must be many detailed considerations of specific cases which will puzzle you, but we cannot do more, without danger of leading you astray, than indicate the mere direction. You must remember that reincarnation is merely successive and continuous embodiments in different ranges of vibration for the purpose of specific development. The range of vibration is determined by the individual need. The attributes pertaining to different scales of vibration are naturally different. Even your senses show you that; where one octave will come to you with the property of color, and another with the property of sound, each with its individual laws and limitations. The particular range of vibrations in which you are now embodied is favorable for certain responses from your consciousness - and I do not mean merely sense responses - but it is not particularly favorable for acquiring facility in other directions. If I might be permitted a very fanciful and possibly far fetched figure, I would say that your strings of life vibrate so slowly that your musical note does not possess the many overtones of vibrations that are higher pitched. A lack of those overtones is your physical limitation. "Only one thing to add: whatever you have gained, you hold. You may be deterred, or stopped; but what solid acquisition you have made is yours eternally. The strings of your lute may be tuned higher, but they can never be slacked." "What then of deterioration through neglect or misuse of capacity?" asked someone, "might not that slack the string?" "You deter. You stop." Gaelic assured him. "You proceed on the next step with infinitely increased difficulty. You do not lose. You can deteriorate your immediate potentiality, and the instruments by which that potentiality night be assured. The gain you make, you hold." |
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The Gaelic Manuscripts Contents